Although the SS-Einsatzgruppen had been deployed in previous military campaigns, they operated during the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 for the first time officially under the title ‘Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD’. Three of the Einsatzgruppen, A to C, were assigned to each of the three Army Groups, North (for the Baltic), Centre (for Belarus) and South (for northern and central Ukraine), whilst the fourth – Einsatzgruppe D – was assigned to the German 11th Army, which was set to advance together with the two Romanian armies through southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. Einsatzgruppe (EG) B, with an initial strength of 655 men, was assigned to Army Group Centre (see Figure 13). In accordance with the agreement reached between the High Command of the Army (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH) and the RSHA in the spring, its two Sonderkommandos (SK), 7a and 7b, would operate in the army rear areas (rückwärtige Armeegebiete), where they would be responsible for securing specific materials and card indexes as well as important individuals (‘leading emigrants, saboteurs, terrorists etc.’), whilst its two larger Einsatzkommandos (EK), 8 and 9, would be deployed further back in the army group rear areas (rückwärtige Heeresgebiete), where they would investigate and tackle movements hostile to Germany – to the extent that these movements did not constitute part of the enemy's armed forces – and provide information to the Wehrmacht on political developments. An Advance Commando Moscow (Vorkommando Moskau), which was to fulfil special tasks in the Soviet capital, was also part of EG B.

At the time of its departure from Pretzsch, Einsatzkommando 9 contained a total of 144 people. Of these, fifteen were SS officers. A further eighty-three were officials of non-officer rank in the Gestapo, the Criminal Police, the SD or the Waffen SS, of which fifty-one were non-commissioned officers (NCOs). As many as forty-six drivers and baggage personnel also belonged to the commando. This contingent included a platoon of Waffen SS reservists. A platoon of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) – the 3rd platoon of the 2nd company of Reserve Police Battalion 9 – also joined the commando in Warsaw. This platoon totalled forty-two men, of which fourteen were NCOs and twenty-eight from the rank and file. The addition of the police platoon took the strength of EK 9 to a combined total of 186 men.

Following his release from prison for health reasons in June 1975, Filbert lived for another fifteen years. He returned to 49 Bamberger Straße in West Berlin, where he would remain until his death in 1990. In 1983, Filbert's pre-1945 biography was the subject of a request for information submitted by the District Administration for State Security in Rostock in East Germany to the Main Department IX/11 within the Ministry of State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, in East Berlin. The request was made in the context of the ‘processing of operative material’ (Bearbeitung eines operativen Materials). The backdrop to the request appears to have been the fact that the District Administration for State Security in Rostock had become aware ‘that in the FRG a film is being made with the professional advice of Fillbert [sic]’ (daß in der BRD ein Film unter Fachberatung des Fillbert gefertigt wird). In fact, Filbert was providing much more than specialist advice: he was acting in the lead role.

The former SD officer, RSHA member and Italy specialist Karl Haß – whose wife had officially declared him dead in 1953 – had played small supporting roles in various feature films during the 1960s, including a bit part in Luchino Visconti's La caduta degli dei (‘The Damned’, 1969), generally as a member of the SA or the SS. The only time a convicted Nazi mass murderer has played a mass murderer in a feature film, however, was in 1984 in the film Wundkanal – Hinrichtung für vier Stimmen (‘Gun Wound – Execution for Four Voices’). According to the film's closing credits, it stars ‘Alfred F.’ in the lead role of ‘Dr S.’. This was Alfred Filbert, wearing a toupee and, intermittently, a false moustache. The character's name was no coincidence. Filbert had once before been known under the name ‘Dr S.’: Dr Selbert, the name he had used for the first six years after the war. In Wundkanal, Filbert was in many ways playing himself. The director and producer was Thomas Harlan, son of Veit Harlan, director of the notorious Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß (‘The Jew Süss’). Harlan junior devoted his life, initially in the Polish archives, later in films and novels, to tracking down and uncovering mid-level Nazi perpetrators and their post-war careers; men like his father, men like Filbert.

On 23 August 1932, more than a year before the end of his university studies in Giessen and five months prior to the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Alfred Filbert joined the SS, which was still officially a sub-organisation of the SA (Sturmabteilung, i.e. Storm Detachment), in Worms. His SS identity card carried the number 44,552. Only days after joining the SS, Filbert also joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) in Worms. His NSDAP membership number was 1,321,414. It is tempting to surmise that Filbert may have been one of the 30,000 people who attended Adolf Hitler's speech of 12 June in the Wormatia Stadium on Alzeyer Straße.

According to Filbert's SS certificate of service (Dienstleisstungszeugnis) from 15 December 1934:

During the period in question, from August 1932 to December 1934, Filbert belonged to the SS-Sturm 4/II/33, later renamed the SS-Sturm 8/33. A Sturm, literally meaning ‘storm’ was a sub-unit of the SS corresponding to a company in the regular army and contained between 70 and 120 members. On Shrove Tuesday (28 February) 1933, Filbert was ‘in the front line’ during the ‘heavy fighting’ in Worms, though he was incapacitated from 23 March to mid-May of the same year by a serious case of liver poisoning. In view of the date on which Filbert's incapacitation began, it is tempting to speculate that this may have been caused by excessive alcohol consumption in celebrating the passing of the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) on 23 March. The Enabling Act allowed the German government under Hitler to enact legislation without the participation of the German parliament, the Reichstag. Filbert's involvement in the ‘heavy fighting’ in Worms on Shrove Tuesday 1933 provided him with an opportunity to ‘distinguish’ himself within the Nazi Movement by engaging in (pre-war) physical violence.

On 14 November 1903, the 24-year-old professional soldier Corporal (Unteroffizier) Peter Filbert of the First Grand Ducal Hessian Lifeguards Infantry Regiment No. 115 (Leibgarde-Infanterie-Regiment (1. Großherzoglich Hessisches) Nr. 115) married the 22-year-old Christiane Kühner, an ironing woman, in Darmstadt. Both were Protestant, as were their respective parents, with the exception of Kühner's mother, Franziska Kühner, née Weiß, who was Catholic. The Lifeguards Infantry Regiment No. 115, garrisoned in Darmstadt, had been founded on 11 March 1621 and was as such the oldest of all German infantry regiments (see Figure 1).

At ten o'clock on the morning of 8 September 1905, Karl Wilhelm Alfred was born in Darmstadt as the youngest of the three children of Peter and Christiane Filbert. Their first child, Lina (see Figure 2), had been born on 26 July 1902 – almost sixteen months before her parents married – in Heidelberg, the birthplace of her mother. Their second child, Alfred's older brother Otto (see Figure 3), had been born on 10 May 1904 in Darmstadt. Alfred would spend the first six years of his life in the Darmstadt garrison of the Lifeguards, at which his father was stationed. During this time his father was promoted to company sergeant major (Kompaniefeldwebel, also known by the slang term Spieß). Filbert would later state, ‘We had a good life then. Of course I wanted to become a soldier. […] After all – the Guards! I was enthusiastic […] as a child.’ In 1911, when Alfred was six, Peter Filbert was taken on by the postal administration as a telegraph inspector. This meant that the family had to leave Darmstadt and move to nearby Worms. It was here that Karl Wilhelm Alfred, known simply as Alfred, went to school. After attending the junior school (Mittelschule) and the upper secondary school (Oberrealschule) in Worms, he left the latter with his secondary school certificate (mittlere Reife) in March 1922 and began an apprenticeship at the Commerz– und Privatbank in Mannheim on 1 April of the same year. During this time he lived with his parents in Worms.

Filbert would later describe his upbringing as ‘proper’ (korrekt). In his home and family life, he knew only ‘command and order’ (Befehl und Ordnung).

Einsatzkommando 9 arrived no later than 25 July in the town of Vileyka, where it remained for several days. Up to this point, during the first five weeks of Germany's military campaign against the Soviet Union, EK 9 – like the other commandos of the four Einsatzgruppen – had targeted primarily Jewish men of military service age. This would change dramatically from Vileyka onwards. According to post-war testimony by Gerhard Schneider and Wilhelm Greiffenberger, it was here, on 29 July, that Filbert gave a talk to the officers of his commando, during which he explained that – on the orders of higher authorities – Jewish women and children were to be included in future shooting operations. The reason Filbert cited was that the unit's execution figures had been criticised as too low. Schneider testified after the war:

Greiffenberger's post-war testimony corroborated Schneider's statement regarding timing, context and nature of the new orders and the location of their communication to the commando:

Why write another biography of a Nazi perpetrator? Why not instead write a biography of a victim of Nazi mass murder? The victims were almost always innocent and helpless, they could alter little about their fate and they possessed no means of influencing decision-making processes. The mindset and conduct of someone who kills requires considerably more explanation than the mindset and conduct of someone who is killed. As the historian Timothy Snyder has noted, ‘It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.’ In view of the estimated total of between 200,000 and 250,000 Germans and Austrians – predominantly, though not exclusively, men – directly involved in the mass murder of European Jewry, the selection of a single subject is neither an easy nor an obvious choice. Over the last two decades, there has been a boom in biographies of leading Nazis. Only to a limited extent, however, has this trend extended specifically to front-line Holocaust perpetrators. Direct killers have not been studied as individual subjects in similar depth to the major figures. Alongside the studies of the leading architects of the Holocaust, Himmler, Heydrich and ‘Gestapo’ Müller, we have only a small handful of individual biographical accounts of mid-level SS (Schutzstaffel, i.e. Protection Echelon) and police functionaries heavily involved in the genocide of European Jewry, for example, on Odilo Globocnik, Walther Rauff or Theodor Dannecker. It remains unclear, however, to what extent the findings made about a perpetrator like Werner Best can be applied to front-line executors of the Holocaust, a group to which Best did not belong. In Ulrich Herbert's landmark biography of Best, furthermore, Werner Best the person runs the risk of disappearing behind his status as a member of a generational category.

Alongside the boom in biographies of leading Nazis, research into Nazi crimes has increasingly focussed in recent years on the mid- and lower-level perpetrators. Frequently, the results of this research have taken the form of collective biographical studies or collections of short biographical sketches. Despite their undeniable value, neither collective accounts nor collections of short sketches can replace in-depth individual biographies.

When the verdict against Filbert was confirmed as legally binding, the former head of EK 9 had already spent just over four years in prison. He was now facing a life sentence in West Berlin's Tegel Prison (Strafanstalt Tegel, today Justizvollzugsanstalt Tegel) at 39 Seidelstraße, where he was given the prisoner number 1251/63. At this time in the Federal Republic of Germany, a distinction was made between different types of imprisonment: penal servitude (Zuchthaus); prison (Gefängnis); confinement (Einschließung); and detention (Haft). Filbert had received a sentence of life in Zuchthaus. The Zuchthaus had emerged as a form of incarceration in the Netherlands and northern Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It combined the twin purposes of chastisement through labour and the opportunity for re-socialisation. In June 1969, the distinction between different types of imprisonment was abolished in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Zuchthaus along with it. Thus, life sentences in Zuchthaus and in Gefängnis were now both altered to the more generic sentence of ‘life imprisonment’ (lebenslange Freiheitsstrafe). This alteration to the Criminal Code also applied to sentences already imposed but not yet, or not yet fully, served. Thus, Filbert's own sentence of life in Zuchthaus was affected by these changes. The provisions came into effect on 1 April 1970.

On 15 January 1964, the Justus Liebig University in Giessen resolved to strip Filbert of the Doctor of Laws title he had obtained on 27 February 1935, as it considered Filbert unworthy of using the doctor title in light of the judgement passed against him by the Regional Court in Berlin. On 12 February 1964, the university wrote to Filbert to inform him of its decision. On 2 March, in a four-and-a-half-page handwritten letter to the university, Filbert filed an objection. In his letter he claimed that he had been appointed head of EK 9 as retribution for the conduct of his brother Otto, who had been imprisoned by the regime for political reasons. He furthermore claimed that refusal to carry out the mass shootings against Jews and other Soviet citizens had been punishable by death. He claimed thus to have had no choice but to commit the crimes of which the Regional Court in Berlin had found him guilty. As he had throughout the legal proceedings against him, he again pleaded superior orders.

In spite of Heydrich's aforementioned clear rebuke of September 1939 to the effect that the SD's foreign intelligence reports required improvement, Filbert had enjoyed a rapid rise through the SD and the ranks of the SS during the period 1935–1939. After becoming a full-time employee of Jost's Office III (Counterintelligence) in the SD Main Office on 1 March 1935, he had been promoted to the first SS officer rank, namely Untersturmführer (equivalent to second lieutenant), on 1 July 1936 (see Figures 8, 9 and 10). Exactly one month later, he had been appointed head of Main Department 22 (Enemy Intelligence Services) within the SD Main Office. Further promotions followed on 30 January 1937 to Obersturmführer (lieutenant) and on 12 September 1937 to Hauptsturmführer (captain). On 1 March 1938, his superior in Office III, SS-Oberführer Rudolf Fumy, had given Filbert the following appraisal:

Filbert's promotion to Sturmbannführer (major) followed eleven days later. On 30 January 1939 he was promoted again to Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel). With the creation of the RSHA in October 1939, Filbert had been appointed both deputy head of Office VI (SD Overseas), and head of the subordinated Group A, General Tasks. It was at this point, in autumn 1939, that his SS career stagnated. Although it would be more than six years before the Nazi regime collapsed, Filbert would remain at the rank of Obersturmbannführer (see Table 1). The reasons for this sudden halt to his rapid ascent are to be sought less in his professional performance and more in his family circumstances, as we will see.

The years 1937–1939 in particular also saw notable developments in Filbert's personal life. On 15 May 1937 he married Käthe Ilse Frieda Bernicke, born on 4 April 1910 in Groß Rhüden in Lower Saxony (see Figures 11 and 12). The couple's first son, Dieter, was born a year later in Berlin on 21 May 1938. On 27 February 1940, Käthe Filbert would give birth to their second son, Günter.

The year 1958 witnessed a turning point in the prosecution in West Germany of violent crimes committed by the Nazi regime and its representatives, above all in Eastern Europe. The so-called Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial (Ulmer Einsatzgruppenprozess) against ten members of the Einsatzkommando Tilsit, which had murdered more than 5,000 Jews in the German-Lithuanian borderlands in the summer of 1941, provoked a startled and appalled response across sections of the West German public and media regarding the magnitude and savagery of the crimes committed. Among the West German authorities, it also led to the realisation of the necessity of a systematic and coordinated nationwide investigation and prosecution of National Socialist crimes. A direct consequence of the Ulm trial was the establishment of the Central Office of the Judicial Authorities of the Federal States for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen) in the city of Ludwigsburg later the same year. Like Ulm, Ludwigsburg was located in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg. The main focus of the investigations carried out by the Zentrale Stelle were the crimes committed by the Einsatzgruppen and its subordinated commandos in the occupied Soviet Union and by units of the Security Police and the Order Police and by ethnic German battalions in Poland.

The year of the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial and the founding of the Zentrale Stelle also ushered in a turning of the tide for Filbert. According to Thomas Harlan, someone had blown the whistle on Filbert; another participant of the regular meetings of former SS men in Berlin. In the autumn of 1958, the West Berlin Public Prosecutor's Office initiated an investigation into former members of Reserve Police Battalion 9, some of whom had been assigned to Einsatzkommando 9 in the summer of 1941. During the questioning of a police official, Filbert's name was mentioned. Preliminary proceedings against almost 250 members of Reserve Police Battalion 9 were ultimately discontinued in early 1960 because their plea of having acted under superior orders (Befehlsnotstand) could not be disproven. The investigation against Filbert and other members of Einsatzkommando 9, on the other hand, continued.

In the second half of February 1959, a few days before Filbert's arrest in Berlin, police officers were in Bad Gandersheim enquiring after his whereabouts.

On 2 July 1941, shortly after departing for the Soviet Union at the head of Einsatzkommando 9, Filbert had been replaced by Walter Schellenberg as group leader and deputy head of Office VI of the RSHA under Heinz Jost. In the second half of October, upon his return to Berlin from his stint in the east, Filbert was accused of having misappropriated RSHA funds. The affair impacted not only on Filbert but also on other senior members of Office VI, namely Jost – who had been fired by Heydrich as early as the beginning of September – and SS-Obersturmbannführer Friedrich Vollheim, head of Group VI C. The charges were used to remove the three of them from office. The specific charges against Filbert were twofold: first, it was claimed that Filbert had illegally retained 60,000 Reich marks in foreign currency in his office safe for his own personal use; second, he was accused of taking out ‘a dubious loan’ (einen zweifelhaften Kredit) for the purchase of a house. The interest rate agreed on for the mortgage was supposedly half a per cent lower than the rate generally applied. The house in question was a villa at 34 Waltharistraße in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, which Filbert had moved into in 1941 (and would then ultimately purchase in 1943). Proceedings were initiated against him and he was questioned by an SS court in Berlin. He later disputed his guilt with the words: ‘Was it thinkable that I, a jurist and a soldier, would do such a thing?’

Filbert was only one of many Nazi criminals who admitted in their post-war testimony to having committed murder (albeit often on a scale much smaller than had actually been the case) but disputed having ever enriched themselves materially or financially. Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka extermination camp, endeavoured after the war to make it clear that no theft had taken place under his command. During the post-war investigation of crimes committed at the Meseritz-Obrawalde psychiatric clinic in occupied Poland, one nurse charged with poisoning patients explained:

On the day of the capitulation of the German armed forces, 8 May 1945, Filbert took leave of his colleagues from the Criminal Police in Flensburg and ‘hiked’, as he put it, to the state of Thuringia in central Germany. His aim was to learn how his family was, for they had been staying with Filbert's parents-in-law at the potash works in Volkenroda. Filbert thus remained loyal to Hitler's regime until well after the latter's suicide on 30 April and, in so doing, avoided the fate of many Germans who were in favour of surrendering without a struggle in order to prevent unnecessary destruction or loss of life, or simply so as to make a good impression on the new power holders, and were therefore murdered in the final weeks of the war by those still loyal to the regime. After he had verified that his wife and sons were still alive, Filbert went to the town of Bad Gandersheim in what is now the neighbouring federal state of Lower Saxony. There, under the assumed name of ‘Alfred Selbert’, he registered with the local authorities in the neighbourhood of Heckenbeck on 2 June 1945. His place of abode was listed as the Hilprechtshausen manor (Gut Hilprechtshausen), his profession as ‘agricultural worker’ and his marital status as ‘single’. Filbert selected the name ‘Selbert’ because he had operated under this name during his time with the SD and still retained the corresponding identity papers. Apparently, Filbert always possessed several ID cards. Filbert would remain in Bad Gandersheim for the next six years. During the immediate post-war months, both the US Army and the British Military Mission in Denmark, successor to the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) Mission (Denmark), were evidently interested in locating Filbert. The description of Filbert in the relevant US Army file ran as follows: ‘Born 8 Sep 1905 in GIESSEN [sic]; height 5'11” (1.80 m); thin build; small chest; dark brown hair; grey-blue eyes; long thin face, pale complexion, large pointed nose, very visible duel scars on chin; wears SS uniform and badly fitting civilian clothes.’

As of 25 June 1945, Filbert's wife, Käthe, registered with the local authorities in Bad Gandersheim along with her two sons at 8 Burgstraße (‘c/o Timmermann’). According to her local registration card, Käthe Filbert was ‘married’. From 1946, Käthe's parents were also registered at this address.